In order to simplify the identification of retail shelves, suppliers of point of sale shelf merchandise identification systems commonly print strips of paper, plastic or film substrates that run from about 6 inches (about 15 cm) to about 50 inches (about 127 cm) in length. Traditionally, offset printing equipment is used to print the strips, where a printing plate is created for each color. The multiple printing plates, usually anywhere from 4 to 12 different color plates, are then installed into the press which produces large sheets containing multiple shelf strips. These sheets are commonly perforated or die cut or slit and then bundled for delivery to the appropriate retail establishment. The offset printing process is wrought with a number of limitations. For example, the length of each strip is limited by the length of the sheets produced by the color press. The length of the sheets are limited to the size of the press machines and thus can only produce strips up to about 130 cm in length. Further limitations include the finite information that can be printed on each strip. Once the plates are installed onto the press, only the images from those plates can be printed until a new set of plates is designed and installed. Therefore, the amount of product information that can be printed onto one strip is extremely limited.
Recently, digital print equipment has become an option for printing shelf strips. A substrate is generally fed from a roll through a digital printer producing a sheet of multiple strips, which are subsequently fed through a sheeting device to be stacked and cut to form strips of the same size as those resulting from offset print equipment. While digital print techniques remove the need for printing plates the technology continues to produce sheets of limited size that must be stacked and cut.
Regardless of the method of printing, once printed and cut, the individual strips are typically ordered according to a predetermined sequence, stacked, and taped or rubber banded together for shipment, and thus usually present themselves to a retailer as a stack of strips. The “bundle” can be 4 to 25 strips in height. Once arriving at the point of sale, the boxes of strips are unloaded and delivered to the shelf locations. During delivery to the shelf locations the tape or bands holding the stacks of strips together have the potential for becoming corrupted (e.g., removed or damaged), which may de-stabilize some stacks. Such stacks may become out of order and can become mixed as they are being used. This creates the need for employee judgment to verify that the correct strip is going in the correct location to avoid incorrect identification of merchandise. The failure of a retailer to properly correlate merchandise information with displayed product could have expensive consequences.
Some strips are pre-printed by a strip supplier onto paperboard panels of about one meter in length which are then stacked on skids and delivered to a retailer. The retailer than separates the individual strips from the panels and sorts the strips and locates them accordingly. Again, employee judgment and intensive labor steps are required.
An example of a strip system can be found in the Shelf Strip™ products provided by Foxfire Printing of Newark, Del. (http://www.foxfireprinting.com/shelfstrip.htm). The 1.4 m long shelf strips provided by Foxfire include pricing and product images at pre-set intervals according to a point of sale's layout. The strips are delivered pre-cut and organized by department according the layout of a particular point of sale as described above in paragraph 002.
Another product is produced by Lexmark International, Inc. of Lexington, Ky. (Lexmark's Planogram Shelf Strips™ at http://www.lexmark.com/vgn/images/portal/Plano.pdf), and provides 1 to 3 meter strips that also contain pricing information and product images for ease of distribution of retail goods onto the appropriate shelves. The information is placed on the strips according to point of sale layout with a pre-set amount of space between each product.
It would be valuable to use a print system that allows for printing strips of massive lengths (e.g., where one strip could contain merchandise information for an entire retail establishment), while minimizing packaging size and reducing employee labor, employee judgment, or both. It would also be valuable to have a system that is compact for shipping, handling, or both. It would even be further attractive to have a system by which the integrity of the printed merchandise information can be kept substantially intact throughout one or any combination of the printing, shipping, or shelving processes.